www.RogerWendell.com
Roger J. Wendell
Defending 3.8 Billion Years of Organic Evolution^SM

(click on this image for satellite view)

Australia! (A subsidiary of China, Inc.) For my 50th birthday, in November '05, Tami and I drove over 5,800 km (3,600 miles) along the west and north coasts of Australia. Our plan was to cover about 10,000 km but Tami broke her leg so we came back to the States a bit early to finish up her surgeries. Nevertheless, it was an interesting road trip and these three web pages cover about 10 percent of the photos we took!

Click Here for my Australia Part Two page...

Click Here for Tami's broken leg in Australia...

(Click on any "Thumbnail" image for a larger view)

Australia Miscellanea:

Aussie Grown Kangaroo Steaks, Tami's ominous encounter with an Australian Chemist, Roger finds another mailbox, Australian Rice Bubbles look very familiar..., Space Center antenna, a bit of Colorado can be found everywhere!, lots of hot weather outback, flies and the police always seem to be following Roger. In the lower row is a casino where we lost money, wild animal poisons, and the ubiquitous signage of military the world over (always reminding the civilian population who is really in charge...)

Australian Termite Mounds and Wide Open Spaces:

The picture of Roger, in the middle, was our first encounter with an Australian termite mound. At first we weren't sure what it was as there was no sign of insect activity and it was literally as hard as rock. After asking around, and seeing thousands more of these throughout the country, we learned that they were, indeed, termite mounds. Apparently each mound maintains an internal temperature of 120 degrees F with 100% humidity. The colony can last as long as 50 years and their earth-churning activity is similar to that of earthworms except that the climate is too hot and dry to support earthworm activity.

Aboriginal Issues:

Okay, one of these pictures probably shouldn't have been taken (I'll let you, gentle reader, figure that one out...) but I felt it would help illustrate what's going on. It appears most of Australia's aboriginal peoples (there were over 350 different "clans," with over 200 distinct languages and dialects at the time the Europeans arrived) want to distance themselves from the European influence and invasion of their country - I can respect that so I did a pretty good job of not photographing people and individuals so as not to make them a spectacle on these pages...

The Australian Government's Park Notes (dated 11/04) states that; "[Aboriginal] ...languages have extensive vocabularies and complex grammars. Today about one hundred languages are still spoken to some extent with fifty languages having a significant number of speakers." Parks Australia also goes on to say that these languages are as distinct and and different from each other as English and Bengali...

Kakadu National Park and Ancient Aboriginal Rock Art:

Kakadu is a World Heritage park that's located in Australia's Northern Territory. Apparently the land's original "owners," at Ubirr, have disappeared so another clan is now watching over the area and leasing the park to the federal government. Like most parks throughout Australia there was no entry fee! Kakadu is huge and has an especially impressive display of ancient rock art - some of the pieces dating nearly 20,000 years BP...

Camping in Australia:

As I mentioned earlier, Australia is huge and wide-open so finding a campsite is no problem. Water, especially in the State of Western Australia and the Northern Territory, is a problem. So, Tami and I usually camped at a public site either in town or at a "Roadhouse" so as to have plenty of water...

Bats, Kangaroos and Wallabies:

The second photo, looking up at the night sky through a hole in the trees, revealed hundreds of bats flying away from their roosts for the evening. It was a wild scene that we barely captured on camera as the bats, as seen here, came out as small "blurs" in the photo due to the open shutter...

Box Jellyfish, Crocodile Danger, and the Arafura Sea:

If you look carefully, after clicking on the third "thumbnail," you'll see a "log-like" featured floating in the middle of the river. This is a wild crocodile that Tami was able to capture by camera!

The Pleistocene-Holocene Event: Forty Thousand Years of Extinction Dave Foreman in his book, Rewilding North America (A Vision for Conservation in the 21st Century), p. 36

"Humans arrived in Australia by forty thousand years ago."

"In Greater Australia, they found a fauna like no other on Earth. By 30,000 BP, however, most of the large mammals, birds, and reptiles were gone. Thirteen genera and at least thirty-eight species of large marsupials were lost forever. The only megafauna surviving in Australia today are four species of kangaroos in a single genus. Among the extinct giant marsupials were a lion-sized carnivore, three species of rhinolike grazers, half-ton wombats, large koalas, and very big kangaroos. Also lost as hunting and burning humans spread over Greater Australia were a 24-foot-long giant sibling to the Komodo dragon, a massive snake, a huge horned tortoise, and an ostrichlike bird."

Midnight Oil Part of their, Beds Are Burning lyrics (see my Lyrics page for the rest!) "Beds Are Burning" is a political song about giving native Australian lands back to the Pintupi, who were among the very last people to come in from the desert. These 'last contact' people began moving from the Gibson Desert to settlements and missions in the 1930s. More were forcibly moved during the 1950s and 1960s to the Papunya settlement. In 1981 they left to return to their own country and established the Kintore community which is nestled in the picturesque Kintore Ranges, surrounded by Mulga and Spinifex country.

The time has come To say fair's fair To pay the rent, now To pay our share

Four wheels scare the cockatoos From Kintore East to Yuendemu The western desert lives and breathes In forty five degrees

The time has come To say fair's fair To pay the rent To pay our share

The time has come A fact's a fact It belongs to them Let's give it back

How can we dance when our earth is turning? How do we sleep while our beds are burning? How can we dance when our earth is turning? How do we sleep while our beds are burning?

Australian Lesson

"I am an Australian and a gun owner (at least for now). I will probably never live in the United States, but earlier this year I joined the NRA for five years. Why did I join the NRA? Because I know that I am going to lose all my guns through further government confiscations and eventual prohibition of civilian ownership, and it will give me some comfort to think that at least there is one major western country where this most vital of individual civil liberties and rights is alive and well."

"Whilst Australia and the United States are very different places with different cultures, particularly with respect to firearms, 40 years ago Australian shooters would have laughed at the idea that in 2015 we would no longer be allowed to possess semi-automatic or pump-action rifles and shotguns, and that handgun ownership would be so restricted that only a few thousand of us would still own them. It looks as though lever-action shotguns will be banned in 2016. We, too, were once a frontier nation.

"Governments will progressively introduce greater restrictions over time - they play the long game. You must learn a lesson from Australia: you must be ever-vigilant and fight to retain your rights and your guns."

Peter Fleming, Australia
Correspondence | Readers Write
American Rifleman, March 2016, p.22

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